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The author and the cloned cat CC.

I enjoy Maureen Dowd’s opinion column in the New York Times. Although, I seldom agree with her politics and positions on issues, few writers can use language so creatively. She can really turn a phrase. As with all of us, sometimes, however, the pursuit of a clever line may stretch the truth a bit too far.

That happened in her column Sunday about Texas Gov. Rick Perry, which was titled “Egghead and Blockheads.” In it she took an indirect swipe at the Vet School at Texas A&M University, where the presidential candidate took classes as an undergrad, earning mostly poor grades. The vet school is a subject I know a little something about from my brief tenure as Chancellor of the A&M System. Despite my background in economics and finance and the Federal Reserve, the Vet School, surprisingly to me, turned out to be my favorite department on the flagship A&M campus.

Before elaborating, let me cite the slight: “It’s enough to make you long for W.’s Gentleman C’s. At least he was a mediocre student at Yale.”

No, A&M is not Yale. Some would say “thankfully.” But A&M is one of the best large research universities in the country, and the Vet School is one of its top schools. A&M (the “A” was originally for agriculture) was an early land grant college designed to give poor rural kids an opportunity for an education. The Corp of Cadets was originally universal at A&M, and former A&M student casualties in America’s wars are second only to West Point’s.

My interest in the Vet School—make that the College of Veterinary Medicine & Biomedical Sciences—began when I became intrigued with its success cloning various animal species. Their first clone was CC the cat—CC standing for Copy Cat. CC had the run of the Dean’s office. They were wondering, when I visited CC, whether she could reproduce. She could, although they wouldn’t let me serve on the committee to choose a suitable mate.

On my first “barnyard tour” I visited the new cloned horse, some very ugly cloned hogs, a deer, goats, and other species. My favorite story from that tour involved a very large bull. Years earlier, around 1992, they had studied an Angus bull—bull number 86--with a natural resistance to several diseases that affect livestock. As I recall the story, bull number 86 had died years ago, but someone saved a piece of him—an ear as I recall—from which years later they cloned a duplicate bull with similar immunities. I thought that fairly impressive, but what really struck me was the name they gave the new bull—86². Would they have thought of that at the Yale Vet School?

One of the superstars in agricultural research at A&M was the late Norman Borlaug, Nobel Peace Prize winner, who was considered the father of the Green Revolution. He is credited with saving perhaps a billion people in third world countries from starvation with his development of high-yield disease-resistant wheat varieties. He was universally acclaimed through most of his career, but in the latter years the left turned against him because he was willing to use fertilizer and pesticides to increase crop yield. Can you imagine?

I talked to A&M’s head cloning scientist recently to catch up and he told me that he and his colleagues were doing less cloning these days and were working more on genetically modifying livestock that are resistant to disease, so as to limit the need for antibiotics and chemicals; animals that more efficiently produce meat and milk (so we need fewer animals); and even livestock that produce vaccines and medicines in their milk (malaria for example) so we can one day vaccinate millions of children in impoverished countries by simply having them drink milk produced from their local goat herds.